Dark Matter(38)

At first, I think the hum inside the hangar is coming from the lights, but it can’t be. It’s so deep I can feel it at the base of my spine, like the ultralow-frequency vibration of a massive engine.

I drift toward the box, mesmerized.

I never fathomed I would see it in the flesh at this scale.

Up close, it isn’t smooth but an irregular surface that reflects the light in such a way as to make it seem multifaceted, almost translucent.

Leighton gestures to the pristine concrete floor gleaming under the lights. “We found you unconscious right over there.”

We walk slowly alongside the box.

I reach out, let my fingers graze the surface.

It’s cold to the touch.

Leighton says, “Eleven years ago, after you won the Pavia, we came to you and said we had five billion dollars. We could’ve built a spaceship, but we gave it all to you. To see what you could accomplish with unlimited resources.”

I ask, “Is my work here? My notes?”

“Of course.”

We reach the far side of the box.

He leads me around the next corner.

On this side, a door has been cut into the cube.

“What’s inside?” I ask.

“See for yourself.”

The base of the door frame sits about a foot off the surface of the hangar.

I lower the handle, push it open, start to step inside.

Leighton puts a hand on my shoulder.

“No further,” he says. “For your own safety.”

“It’s dangerous?”

“You were the third person to go inside. Two more went in after you. So far, you’re the only one to return.”

“What happened to them?”

“We don’t know. Recording devices can’t be used inside. The only report we can hope for at this point has to come from someone who manages to make it back. Like you did.”

The inside of the box is empty, unadorned, and dark.

Walls, floor, and ceiling made of the same material as the exterior.

Leighton says, “It’s soundproof, radiation-proof, airtight, and, as you might have guessed, puts out a strong magnetic field.”

As I close the door, a deadbolt thunks into place on the other side.

Staring at the box is like seeing a failed dream raised from the dead.

My work in my late twenties involved a box much like this one. Only it was a one-inch cube designed to put a macroscopic object into superposition.

Into what we physicists sometimes call, in what passes for humor among scientists, cat state.

As in Schr?dinger’s cat, the famous thought experiment.

Imagine a cat, a vial of poison, and a radioactive source in a sealed box. If an internal sensor registers radioactivity, like an atom decaying, the vial is broken, releasing a poison that kills the cat. The atom has an equal chance of decaying or not decaying.

It’s an ingenious way of linking an outcome in the classical world, our world, to a quantum-level event.

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests a crazy thing: before the box is opened, before observation occurs, the atom exists in superposition—an undetermined state of both decaying and not decaying. Which means, in turn, that the cat is both alive and dead.

And only when the box is opened, and an observation made, does the wave function collapse into one of two states.

In other words, we only see one of the possible outcomes.

For instance, a dead cat.

And that becomes our reality.

But then things get really weird.

Is there another world, just as real as the one we know, where we opened the box and found a purring, living cat instead?

The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says yes.

That when we open the box, there’s a branch.

One universe where we discover a dead cat.

One where we discover a live one.

And it’s the act of our observing the cat that kills it—or lets it live.

And then it gets mind-f*ckingly weird.

Because those kinds of observations happen all the time.

So if the world really splits whenever something is observed, that means there’s an unimaginably massive, infinite number of universes—a multiverse—where everything that can happen will happen.

My concept for my tiny cube was to create an environment protected from observation and external stimuli so my macroscopic object—an aluminum nitride disc measuring 40 μm in length and consisting of around a trillion atoms—could be free to exist in that undetermined cat state and not decohere due to interactions with its environment.

I never cracked that problem before my funding evaporated, but apparently some other version of me did. And then scaled the entire concept up to an inconceivable level. Because if what Leighton is saying is true, this box does something that, according to everything I know about physics, is impossible.

I feel shamed, like I lost a race to a better opponent. A man of epic vision built this box.

A smarter, better me.

I look at Leighton.

“Does it work?”

He says, “The fact that you’re standing here beside me would appear to suggest that it does.”

“I don’t get it. If you wanted to put a particle in a quantum state in a lab, you’d create a deprivation chamber. Remove all light, suck out the air, turn down the temperature to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. It would kill a human being. And the larger you go, the more fragile it all becomes. Even though we’re underground, there are all sorts of particles—neutrinos, cosmic rays—passing through that cube that could disturb a quantum state. The challenge seems insurmountable.”